Starmer prepares to make his pitch

Keir Starmer is giving his big speech at noon today, the first one he’s been able to give to a packed conference hall since becoming leader. He seems to think that this means he needs to reintroduce himself to his own party and the electorate, and to that end we’ve been promised more detail on his backstory. But the Labour leader’s problem is not so much that people don’t know who he is as that they don’t really know what he stands for.

To that end, Starmer does plan to make a sweep of policy announcements, only a handful of which have been trailed. We know to expect an emphasis on wellbeing and mental health. The former has been something that a lot of his frontbenchers, including Jon Ashworth and Ed Miliband, have been talking about throughout this week. The leader will pledge to ‘create an economy in which people are healthy and well-educated’.